Five dead in S.C. shooting committed by ex-NFL player Phillip Adams, who then killed himself, authorities say
InternationalApr 09. 2021An intersection in Rock Hill, S.C., on Oct. 20, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Allison Lee Isley
By The Washington Post · Timothy Bella
At least five people are dead, including two children, in what police in York County, S.C., called a “case of a mass shooting” that involved a former National Football League player as the suspected gunman.
Four of the victims of the Wednesday shooting came from what authorities described as a “very prominent and very well-known” family in the Rock Hill community: Robert Lesslie, a 70-year-old doctor; his wife, Barbara Lesslie, 69; and two grandchildren, Adah, 9, and Noah, 5. The fifth victim, James Lewis, 38, of Gastonia, N.C., was working at the home at the time of the shooting.
The York County Sheriff’s Office confirmed in a news release to The Washington Post on Thursday that the suspected gunman was Phillip Adams, a former NFL player who killed himself early Thursday after an hours-long search by police. York County Coroner Sabrina Gast said Adams, 32, died of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Adams is from Rock Hill.
The coroner told WCNC, an NBC affiliate in Charlotte, that Adams was found dead inside his father’s home after a standoff with police.
Adams’s father, Alonzo, told WCNC that his son had been “a good kid. I think the football messed him up.”
Alonzo Adams, who was visibly shaken while speaking to reporters, said that Robert Lesslie had been his doctor a long time ago and that “they were good folks down there. We’re going to keep them in our prayers.”
In a statement released by the sheriff’s office, members of the Lesslie family said they were still sorting through the heartbreak, shock and grief of the tragedy.
“We are truly in the midst of the unimaginable,” the family said in a statement. “The losses we are suffering cannot be uttered at this time.”
A sixth person was wounded in the shooting and taken to a hospital for “serious gunshot wounds,” York County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Trent Faris said at a news conference.
“It doesn’t happen here,” Faris – who also had Lesslie as his doctor growing up – said of the shooting. “It’s one of those strange things that a lot of people are going to have a hard time understanding.”
The South Carolina attack comes on the heels of mass shootings in the Atlanta area and Boulder, Colo., and renewed calls from lawmakers and others to ban assault weapons. On Thursday, President Biden announced a half-dozen executive actions focused on curbing gun violence, his first initiatives on guns as president.
Police responded to the scene just before 5 p.m. Wednesday after a report of a multiple-victim shooting on Marshall Road. In a 911 call published by the sheriff’s office, a man who called authorities said he heard about 20 shots fired.
“I think we’ve had some trouble,” the caller said to 911. “I think there’s been a bad shooting.”
In a separate 911 call, another man reported to authorities that one of his workers from his heating and air-conditioning company had called him to tell him he had been shot and that the other was unresponsive.
When police arrived, they said, they found the four family members dead inside the home and Lewis just outside.
Just after 1:30 a.m. Thursday, police announced that they had identified the person they believed to be the gunman.
“There is no active threat to the community,” the sheriff’s office tweeted.
An hours-long search for the gunman stretched into Wednesday night and early Thursday, police said. Authorities described the gunman as a young Black man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and camouflage pants.
Phillip Adams, who was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2010, played for six teams over six seasons, last playing for the Atlanta Falcons in 2015. He had no previous criminal record.
The Lesslie family has been a mainstay in the Rock Hill community for 40 years, and Robert Lesslie founded Riverview House Calls & Riverview Hospice and Palliative Care. According to the medical center’s website, the doctor and his wife have four children and eight grandchildren.
At the news conference, Faris acknowledged that the doctor had cared for him growing up.
“Dr. Lesslie has been one of those people that everybody knows,” he said.
In their statement to police, members of the Lesslie family honored their loved ones by finding forgiveness in the shooting that killed five. They also offered “prayers and compassion” to Adams’s family.
“While we know there are no answers that will satisfy the question ‘why,’ we are sure of one thing,” they said. “We do not grieve as those without hope.”
Joye Hummel, first woman hired to write Wonder Woman comics, dies at 97
InternationalApr 09. 2021Wonder Woman writer Joye Hummel donated her archives to the Smithsonian Institution in 2014. In her hands is the psychology take-home exam that had drawn William Moulton Marston’s attention. MUST CREDIT: Elizabeth O’Brien/Smithsonian Institution
By The Washington Post · Harrison Smith
In March 1944, shortly before Joye Hummel graduated from the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school in Manhattan, she was invited to meet with one of her instructors, a charismatic psychologist who had been impressed by her essays on a take-home test.
Over tea at the Harvard Club, professor William Moulton Marston offered her a job – not in the classroom or psych lab, but in the office of his 43rd Street art studio. He wanted Hummel to help him write scripts for Wonder Woman, the Amazonian superhero he had created three years earlier and endowed with a magic lasso, indestructible bracelets, an eye-catching red bustier and a feminist sensibility.
Hummel, then 19, had never read Wonder Woman; she had never even read a comic book. But Marston needed an assistant. His character, brought to life on the page by artist H.G. Peter, was appearing in four comic books and was about to star in a syndicated newspaper strip. He was looking for someone young who could write slang and who, perhaps most importantly, shared his philosophy and vision for the character.
“You understand that I want women to feel they have the right to go out, to study, to find something they love to do and get out in the world and do it,” Hummel recalled his saying. She was “astonished and delighted” by the job offer, according to historian Jill Lepore’s book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” and soon began writing for the comic. “I always did have a big imagination,” she said.
Hummel worked as a Wonder Woman ghostwriter for the next three years, long before any woman was publicly credited as a writer for the series. As invisible to readers as Wonder Woman’s transparent jet plane, she was increasingly recognized after Lepore interviewed her in 2014. Four years later, she received the Bill Finger Award, given to overlooked or underappreciated comic book writers at the Eisner Awards.
Hummel, who was known in recent years by her married name, Joye Murchison Kelly, died April 5 at her home in Winter Haven, Fla., a day after turning 97. Her son Robb Murchison confirmed the death but did not know the precise cause.
“Joye was absolutely a pioneer in bringing her own voice into these stories,” Lepore said in a phone interview. “She was then pretty much entirely forgotten. . . . I sort of think that people hadn’t bothered to find her. I called her up and said, ‘Are you the Joye Hummel who wrote Wonder Woman in the 1940s?’ She nearly dropped the receiver – she was delighted but surprised. It was a story she had told her grandchildren, but they didn’t believe her.”
A Wonder Woman comic and one of Ms. Hummel’s original scripts, from her archives before she donated them to the Smithsonian. MUST CREDIT: Robb Murchison
By the time Hummel started writing for Wonder Woman, the comics had an audience of 10 million readers. The character debuted in a 1941 issue of All-Star Comics, three years after Superman first lifted a car on the cover of Action Comics and two years after Batman leaped across the pages of Detective Comics.
Together, the three superheroes became linchpins of DC Comics, with Wonder Woman emerging as arguably the world’s most famous female superhero. She appeared on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s first issue (“Wonder Woman for President”), inspired a hit 1970s TV show starring Lynda Carter and was revitalized for the big screen beginning in 2016, played by Gal Gadot.
The character was “created by a whole series of women” who were never publicly credited, Lepore said. Marston – whose psychological research contributed to the development of the lie-detector test – received help from his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, as well as their partner, Olive Byrne, the daughter of radical feminist Ethel Byrne and niece of birth-control activist Margaret Sanger. Both women worked behind the scenes, forming a fruitful creative triad and secret domestic arrangement: one husband, two wives.
After Hummel became the first woman hired to write for Wonder Woman, Byrne gave her a copy of Sanger’s book “Woman and the New Race,” which advocated for legalized birth control, and told her it contained everything she needed to know about the character.
Hummel at first typed Marston’s scripts before writing more than 70 scripts of her own, with detailed instructions for the artists. She developed stories that were often more innocent than her boss’s, which showed Wonder Woman fighting fascism while also being bound, tied, lassoed or gagged. Years later, she recalled that when she brought her scripts to editor Sheldon Mayer, “He always OK’d mine faster because I didn’t make mine as sexy.”
All of the early comics were published under a pseudonym, Charles Moulton, invented by Marston. Individual writers were credited in later anthologies by DC, which revealed that Hummel was behind some of the series’ more fantastical stories, involving beautiful mermaids and winged maidens. “They’re like fairy tales,” said cartoonist and historian Trina Robbins, who later worked on Wonder Woman.
Hummel stopped writing the comics in late 1947, shortly after she married, deciding to stay home and raise her stepdaughter. Marston had died earlier that year, and the series passed to writers who did away with much of the comic’s feminist messaging, including a regular centerfold feature chronicling the lives of influential women.
The changes infuriated Hummel, who remained loyal to Marston’s original vision of Wonder Woman as an emblem of free and courageous womanhood. Decades later, she wrote in an email to Lepore: “Even if I had not left because of my new daughter, I would have resigned if I was told I had to make [Wonder Woman] a masculine thinking and acting superwoman.”
Joye Evelyn Hummel was born April 4, 1924, and grew up on Long Island. Her son said that she rarely spoke of her upbringing; at various times, both of her parents apparently managed a grocery store chain.
After graduating from high school in Freeport, N.Y., she enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont. She left after a year, later telling the comic magazine Alter Ego that her parents had divorced and she didn’t want to leave her mother alone.
Hummel joined the comics industry during a brief period in which female writers were not uncommon, according to Robbins, filling in for men who were fighting in World War II. When Marston was diagnosed with polio some five months after they started working together, she took on an increasingly significant share of the writing.
For the rest of their collaboration together, they met at his sprawling home in Rye, N.Y. His daughter Olive Ann served as a flower girl when Hummel married David Murchison, an Army veteran and home builder, in 1947.
After Murchison’s death in 2000, Hummel married Jack Kelly. In addition to her husband, of Winter Haven, and son, of Naples, Fla., survivors include a stepdaughter from her first marriage, Sally Boyd of Wellington, Fla.; two stepchildren from her second marriage, Kimberly Hallberg of Spring Hill, Fla., and Jeffrey Kelly of Oak Island, N.C.; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her son David Murchison Jr. died in 2015.
Hummel donated her Wonder Woman archives to the Smithsonian Libraries in 2014. In interviews, she often downplayed her writing for the comics, describing it as a relatively small part of her life. Years after retiring from DC, for instance, she had gone back to work at age 40, taking a job as a secretary at a brokerage firm in Hollywood, Fla.
She later studied to become a stockbroker herself. “I believe Marston would feel proud of me,” she told the Florida magazine Haven in 2017, recalling the months of study it took to pass her certification exams and become registered on the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade. Doing so “enabled me to help finance the college education for my three children.”
As her son put it, “She was really a wonder woman.”
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden announced an array of executive actions Thursday morning intended curb gun violence, following pressure from activists and fellow Democrats in the aftermath of two recent mass shootings.
In the White House Rose Garden, the president announced new rules on firearms that are assembled at home, which lack serial numbers and are harder to track, among other moves designed to make it harder for unqualified people to obtain dangerous weapons.
Biden also named David Chipman as his pick to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, although it is unclear how the nominee will fare in an evenly divided Senate. Chipman is a senior adviser to a gun control group founded by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was severely injured in a mass shooting in 2011.
Biden was joined Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland and first lady Jill Biden.
Biden’s moves come amid growing impatience from gun control activists that the administration has not acted more quickly. Biden promised during his campaign that he would take action to limit gun violence on the first day of his administration, but that fell by the wayside.
In his presidency’s early days, Biden has prioritized other emergency issues, including coronavirus pandemic relief and the struggling economy. He suggested recently that he considers gun control a less urgent priority that can be tackled over the long term.
But the issue of gun violence moved vividly the forefront after the two mass shootings, one in the Atlanta area in which eight people were killed and another in Colorado, where 10 were killed.
Biden’s aides stressed that beyond mass shootings, the president wants to focus on curbing the more frequent and deadlier epidemic of day-to-day gun violence that disproportionately affects Blacks and Latinos.
A former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden has a long record of arms control initiatives, including the 10-year assault weapons ban that was part of a 1994 crime bill he sponsored.
But the politics of gun control are turbulent. Rural voters, who skew sharply Republican, strongly support gun rights, while the suburbanites coveted by both parties tend to be more open to gun control.
Among Biden’s highest-profile moves Thursday was directing his administration to take action on “ghost guns,” firearms without serial numbers that are sold in kits and assembled at home.
The president also directed the Justice Department to draft a new rule regulating a device that can be placed on a pistol to turn it into a short-barreled rifle.
And he ordered the department to create a template that states can use to enact “red flag” laws, which allow judges to seize firearms from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others.
Other initiatives include asking the Justice Department to issue a report on gun trafficking and directing several agencies to allocate more money for violence intervention programs.
New York just became the first state to offer a digital “vaccine passport” – a free app and website you can use to prove you’ve been vaccinated against the coronavirus or gotten a recent negative coronavirus test result. With the new technology, called the Excelsior Pass, New Yorkers can show a screen or a printout with a special code that businesses scan with an app made by the state. A green check mark means you’re allowed inside.
Regardless of where you live, vaccine passports on the horizon promise to fast-track our safe return to public spaces. But only if people are able to access and trust them. And that’s a big if.
With the help of New Yorkers across a range of ages, I’ve been testing Excelsior Pass to see whether digital vaccine passports create more problems than they solve. Using Excelsior Pass is entirely voluntary, but it requires learning about the state’s system and mastering a few different websites and apps. It took me 20 minutes over Zoom to help an octogenarian set up his pass, though it was certainly simpler than mastering vaccine-appointment websites. Even when we thought we understood the system, Excelsior Pass didn’t always work: My tech-reporter colleague tried to use it to enter Yankee Stadium, but the system didn’t update with his clearance until after the game was over.
The good news: For the digitally savvy people who figure it out, using Excelsior Pass doesn’t appear to pose major privacy risks. The system, designed for the state by IBM, cannot be easily used by the state to track you. And it’s more discreet than the alternative of showing your medical records to a bouncer.
But I question how effective Excelsior Pass will be at keeping everyone safe. For one, it’s pretty easy to set up a fake pass. (Yikes, you might want to take down any vaccine selfies you posted to social media.) To stop potential fraud, you always have to show your ID along with Excelsior Pass – which is another kind of barrier that could make some people not want to use it.
As other states and even private companies work on their own vaccine passports, some of New York’s other choices also deserve scrutiny. The state hasn’t been very clear about where, and for how long, we might be required to show a vaccine passport – digital or physical. We all expect to need a passport at a border crossing, but will we eventually need a vaccine passport at Starbucks? The grocery store? Work? I found you could technically already use Excelsior Pass to scan your own dinner party guests . . . if they’d still call you a friend after.
At Madison Square Garden, which used Excelsior Pass for three games last week, most people still aren’t using the app – but it’s doing the job of being quick. “While the numbers are still small, they’ve nearly doubled at every game, which we expect will continue as more people become familiar with the app,” spokeswoman Kim Kearns says. “From a technology standpoint, everything has been straightforward, and worked well.”
As goes New York, so goes the nation? Here’s what we can all learn from the early days of Excelsior Pass.
In the United States, the good vaccine news keeps coming. For much of the world, things look bleak.
As of Thursday, just short of 20% of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated, giving some 66 million people a strong measure of protection against a disease that has already killed more than 500,000 Americans.
By contrast, Covax – a World Health Organization-backed push for equitable distribution – aims to secure enough doses to cover up to 20% of the people in participating countries by the end of 2021, but it may not meet that relatively modest goal, experts warn.
The gap between the vaccine “haves” and “have-nots” is widening, fueling frustration and potentially extending the pandemic.
“It’s unconscionable,” said Zain Rizvi, an expert on access to medicine at Public Citizen, a watchdog group. “Many countries will be lucky if by the end of the year they are close to where the U.S. is now.”
So far, the vaccine race has been dominated by a handful of relatively wealthy nations: most notably Israel, where nearly 57% the population was fully vaccinated as of April 7; Chile, at about 22%; and the United States. Britain has been vaccinating rapidly, as well, but it has delayed second doses as it tries to get a first to as many people as possible.
Meanwhile, Our World in Data estimates based on publicly reported data that at least 5% of the global population has had a dose, with the real number (incorporating China’s nonpublic tally) perhaps between 6 and 7%.
Priority-supply deals, export restrictions and other means of hoarding by rich nations have contributed to a severe global supply crunch and left many countries scrambling.
Covax has delivered 38 million doses, providing potentially lifesaving shots to places and people that might otherwise go without. Yet divided between 100 economies, those doses amount to only a thin layer of protection.
“It’s been heartening to see a small number of doses reaching countries around the world,” said Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Center at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. “But the big picture is more troubling than reassuring, because we have a lot of things are not going well.”
While the U.S. administers millions of inoculations a day, some countries are still waiting for their first shots to arrive, or have just started vaccinating. A recent WHO estimate suggested that just 2% of the 690 million doses administered to date globally went to Africa.
A chorus of experts and officials have argued – for months – that rich countries have not only a moral obligation to close the gap, but an interest in doing so. With a fraction of the world’s population vaccinated, they argue, the global economy won’t recover and the virus will mutate and spread.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday called for speeding up distribution to poorer nations, warning that the pandemic may force 150 million people into poverty, hurting growth.
“Our first task must clearly be stopping the virus by ensuring that vaccinations, testing and therapeutics are available as widely as possible,” she said in remarks delivered to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The same day, while introducing a new coordinator for global covid response and health security, Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed the danger of variants.
“Even if we vaccinate all 332 million people in the United States tomorrow, we would still not be fully safe from the virus, not while it’s still replicating around the world and turning into new variants that could easily come here and spread across our communities again,” he said.
Still, Blinken defended the effort to vaccinate Americans first and suggested that further action would have to wait until the United States was more confident of its vaccine supply.
“I know that many countries are asking for the United States to do more, some with growing desperation because of the scope and scale of their covid emergencies,” he said. “We hear you. And I promise, we’re moving as fast as possible.”
The woman he introduced as the new global covid response coordinator, Gayle Smith, served as the chief executive of the ONE Campaign, a nonprofit organization that has called on wealthy countries to donate 5% of their surplus doses once they’ve vaccinated 20% of their population.
For its part, the Biden administration announced the “loan” of a combined 4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine – not yet authorized by U.S. regulators – to Mexico and Canada. It is not clear, however, if or when the administration will offer up a more substantial portion of the hundreds of millions of surplus doses the country has secured.
A recent survey of 788 Americans by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University found strong support for the idea of donating 10% or more of the U.S. supply to less prosperous countries, but views were divided on the timing. While 41% of respondents said donations should happen immediately, 28% wanted to wait until at-risk Americans had been vaccinated and 31% said donations should happen only after everyone in the United States who wanted to be vaccinated had been.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered in February to donate doses to 20 foreign allies, but the plan was put on hold in the face of domestic pushback and lawsuits.
The Biden administration’s moves so far have focused on longer-term efforts to bolster the global rollout.
In February, the White House threw its support behind Covax, announcing up to $4 billion dollars, including an initial contribution of $2 billion that Congress appropriated in December.
And last month, the United States, India, Japan and Australia pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute up to 1 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine with a focus on Southeast Asia. But the timeline is long, with a goal of having things up and running before the end of next year.
The Biden administration has so far resisted pressure to waive patent protections in a way that would allow more countries to make coronavirus vaccines.
However, recent statements from Blinken suggest some new initiative could be on the way.
“The clock is ticking,” said Moon, “and the situation is not getting better.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Peter Laca, Jake Rudnitsky
Slovakia and Russia clashed over the Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine after the European Union member accused Moscow of delivering shots that were different from those used in a peer-reviewed study.
Russia rejected the allegations and demanded Bratislava return the 200,000 doses it sent. The dispute may set back efforts to use Sputnik widely in Europe. Slovakia was one of a few members of the bloc pushing to use the Russia-developed vaccine to help speed the roll-out of inoculations. But political tensions over the push to use what one critic called “a tool in hybrid war” caused a crisis that cost Prime Minister Igor Matovic his job.
EU regulators are still reviewing Sputnik’s application and the process could take several months, leading some nations to undertake their own checks to accelerate approval.
But a day after saying it hasn’t received sufficient documentation from the Sputnik’s developers to declare it safe and effective, the Slovak regulator went further, charging that the doses it received have different properties than the ones described in an article in The Lancet medical journal earlier this year. That widely cited report found Sputnik to be 91.6% effective and gave a major boost to Russia’s efforts to distribute it abroad, allaying some concerns about the Kremlin’s rush to approve the vaccine at home.
“According to published reports, Sputnik should be used in about 40 countries, although these vaccines are associated only by the name,” Zuzana Batova, the head of Slovak State Institute for Drug Control, said in a report. “The comparability and consistency of various batches produced in different places hasn’t been confirmed. In several cases, it appears that the vaccines have different properties.”
The Slovak regulator said Wednesday it was still conducting tests, but added that it hasn’t been able to come to a conclusion about the risks and benefits of Sputnik because of the “lack of a large amount of data from the producer, the inconsistency of the drug forms and the inability to compare batches used in various studies and countries.”
Sputnik’s developers dismissed the claims as “disinformation” and said all batches of the inoculation are of the same quality and undergo vigorous quality control.
“In violation of existing contract and in an act of sabotage the State Institute of Drug Control ensured that Sputnik V tested in a laboratory which is not part of the EU’s Official Medicines Control Laboratory network,” the developers wrote on Twitter.
Slovakia and Hungary are the only two EU members to agree to use the Russian-developed vaccine. On Thursday, Germany said it plans to hold bilateral discussions with Russia on buying doses amid criticism of a slow start to its inoculation campaign.
The nation of 5.5 million agreed to buy 2 million Sputnik V shots. But when junior coalition parties said the deal had been agreed behind their backs, Matovic was forced to swap jobs with the finance minister. Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok has called Sputnik “a tool in a hybrid war” as the country’s right-of-center parties expressed concerns its purchase may undermine the European Union and NATO member’s foreign-policy direction.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund, which backed the vaccine’s development and handles its international roll-out, has set a target of increasing overseas output sufficiently to inoculate nearly one in ten people globally this year.
สหรัฐพร้อมออกกฎหมาย ‘เซมิคอนดักเตอร์’ แก้ปัญหาชิปขาดตลาด
นักวิทย์เตือนมีไวรัสที่ยังไม่ค้นพบอีก 1.7 ล้านไวรัส ครึ่งหนึ่งติดสู่มนุษย์และก่อโรคระบาดได้ 
หญิงญี่ปุ่นรายนี้เป็นผู้ป่วยโควิด-19 คนแรกที่ได้รับบริจาคปอดจากผู้ที่ยังมีชีวิตอยู่ ซึ่งเป็นสามีและลูกชายของเธอเสียด้วย
สหรัฐขึ้นบัญชีดำบริษัทอัญมณีของกองทัพเมียนมาตัดเส้นทางสร้างรายได้
An intersection in Rock Hill, S.C., on Oct. 20, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Allison Lee Isley
Wonder Woman writer Joye Hummel donated her archives to the Smithsonian Institution in 2014. In her hands is the psychology take-home exam that had drawn William Moulton Marston’s attention. MUST CREDIT: Elizabeth O’Brien/Smithsonian Institution
